Background
She was born in Kruševac on 27 March 1862, and featured as a prominent Serbian writer of the late 19thand early 20th-century.
She was born in Kruševac on 27 March 1862, and featured as a prominent Serbian writer of the late 19thand early 20th-century.
She taught herself to speak French, English, Russian, Italian, Greek and Turkish. Jelena Dimitrijević travelled widely, describing her experiences of Greece, India, Egypt and America in a series of books The principal feature of Dimitrijević"s erudition was the vastness of the field which it embraced.
She also wrote lyric poetry as well as novels, but is possibly most famous for her Pisma iz Nisa o Haremima / Letters from Niš Regarding Harems (1897), a semi-fictionalised, semi-historical, anthropological narrative containing portraits of life in the Turkish harems 50 years before her birth when the south-Serbian city of Niš was still a part of the Ottoman Empire, and Pisma iz Soluna / Letters from Salonica, a genuine travelogue from the Ottoman Empire during the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, of which Salonica was the centre.
The Letters were published first in Srpski književni glasnik (Serbian Literary Review) in 1908-1909, and then as a separate book in 1918 in Sarajevo. She also wrote Pisma iz Indije / Letters from India in 1928, Pisma iz Misira / Letters from Egypt in 1929, and Novi svet ili u Americi godinu dana / The New World, alias: In America for a Year in 1934.
Along with Isidora Sekulić, Jelena Dimitrijević is one of the first feminist authors in Serbia. She died in Belgrade on 10 April 1945.
Such portraits are valuable counter to the narrow conceptions of nineteenthand early twentieth-century feminism which see it firmly rooted in north-west Europe and North America.
